


the new house

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Coulson's Daddy Issues, Domestic, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Future Fic, not season 5 compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-06-26 06:51:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15658011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: Daisy finds something interesting when she and Coulson go through his old stuff.





	the new house

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RowboatCop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RowboatCop/gifts).



There weren’t supposed to be personal items in this batch of boxes, only old clothes and discarded files, and Daisy running her thumb over the moth-eaten collars of t-shirts, like she’s picking up her own personal wardrobe.

“I’d better throw all that out,” he says.

He only wanted the boxes because of the files, because, old as the cases are, they’d better not all to the wrong hands. In any case it felt like a rite of passage, moving all that stuff here.

“Aw,” Daisy complains, holding out a ridiculously conspicuous sweater with the SHIELD logo on it.

He groans, feeling like a tool, and feeling like a ghost, giving it a cursory glance.

“I don’t think I fit in there anymore,” he declares.

Daisy raises an eyebrow, her _oh, I don’t know_ face. 

“Then _I_ am going to wear it,” she tells him. “Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do, as your finally official significant other and co-owner of this house? Lounge around it with nothing on but your old sweater?”

She chuckles softly at her own joke and puts the piece of clothing on the “to keep” pile. Coulson tries to look stoic, like he just didn’t picture her naked legs on the very couch they are standing next to.

It’s very hard.

Meanwhile Daisy resumes going through his stuff. He’s delighted she seems so engrossed, even though he thinks it’s a waste of time. He doesn’t have interesting possessions from his SHIELD years - then again, he wasn’t a very interesting person at the time.

He takes another look at the living room; it’s not very practical, is it? Not for a couple of ex-agents, for a world famous superhero, for an Inhuman, for two people with as many enemies as they have. But then again this is not a safe house. _The point_ was that it should be impractical. It should be a house. A home, maybe. 

Then Daisy unearths something - something he wasn’t expecting to see again.

“What is this?” she asks, holding the frame to him. 

Coulson shifts his weight from one feet to the other.

“That’s me,” he points out. “I must have been six. And that’s my dad.”

He swallows, not looking directly at the muscled blonde man, focusing on the grain of the photograph itself, the mixture of bright color and washed out texture that screams early 1970s.

" _This_ is your father?" Daisy asks. " _Wow_. He's-"

"Handsome? Yeah I know."

Nothing he hasn't heard before.

"No, not just that," she corrects him. "It's just that... he looks like – like Captain America."

Coulson freezes.

" _Oh_ ," Daisy starts again. "Oh, right. He _looks like Captain America_."

The picture stares at him, accusingly. No one had ever made the connection – not even Fury (or maybe he had but he'd never say anything, that'd be like him).

Daisy doesn't let go of the picture and Coulson draws his hand over the frame for a moment.

"He was a bit like Captain America," he confesses. "Well, to me at least."

"Your hero?"

"He was my hero," Coulson replies. "He could have been anything – an athlete. He was poor as dirt but he was bright, could have gotten any scholarship, become a doctor or a lawyer. But no, he said the world needed teachers."

"He sounds amazing."

"I don't remember much of him," Coulson confesses. Daisy touches his arm, gingerly, sweetly. It's so strange, Coulson thinks, to be talking about this and have someone react like Daisy. To know he can always go to her and find understanding and comfort. "What I remember is that every time someone in the neighborhood was in trouble they'll always come to my father for advice. It'll be the middle of the night and I'd woke up and find strangers talking to my parents in our kitchen."

He passes his hands over his eyes, like it's physically draining to remember. He had tried so hard to keep that stuff out of his mind - close it all off when his father died. 

"He reminds me of my mother," Daisy says. His voice is soft and strange – she doesn't often talk about Jiaying. There is a sense of longing there and Coulson is about to same something, apologize, anything. Daisy then changes her expression. "I mean, before she went crazy and started trying to murder everybody. Your dad probably didn't do that."

"No, I don't think so," Coulson replies. “But I know what you mean.”

She looks grateful for that. 

"But hey, look, we have the first family picture."

She leaves the photograph, casually, as if it were nothing, on the dining room table.

"Are you sure?" Coulson asks her, sliding one arm around her waist. He's been wanting to do that for a while. He’s still not over it - one year on - how much he misses touching her whenever he’s not. Even if it’s just a couple of minutes.

"Am I sure I want your super hot dad on your mantelpiece?" she teases, trying to raise a groan out of him.

He doesn't give it to her, but he draws her closer in his arms. The room becomes warmer immediately. 

"About the house," he corrects her, and despite the playful journey of his fingers over the small of her back, he's dead serious.

Dead serious she replies. Coulson thinks that's why he loves her so much: no one ever takes him as seriously as she does.

"I'm course I'm sure," she says. "It's not much but... I want it."

He half expects her to look away for a moment, like she does whenever she thinks she’s said something selfish or self-centered (which is never the case, for the record) and it means a lot of Coulson that she doesn’t, that she trusts him with her wishes and desires. 

And that she wants this _with him_... Coulson is not sure when that’s going to stop being a shock.

Not today, anyway, judging from Daisy’s worried reaction to the face he didn’t know he was making.

"Hey, are you okay? Did I say-?"

Coulson shakes his head.

"I just never thought I'd have this," he tries to explain to her, leaving the _this_ ambiguous, but obviously not referring just to a crappy apartment in D.C. "That part of my life when this was a possibility... I thought it was over."

It's a pretty big (and pathetic) confession on his part, and in a way he'd rather not tell Daisy (not tell her that he isn't young and new, that he wasn't hopeful, that he was done for, before he found her in that alleyway), but he wants her to know. Because he always wants her to know everything, and whereas before they were together he had been able to keep that desire to just spill his every secret and thought and memory to her at bay (though only sometimes), now it's basically impossible.

Daisy tilts her head and smiles at him in a way that makes Coulson feel she is regarding a small child, or something that requires a lot of tenderness.

“I never even thought this,” she gestures, her _this_ as abstract as his. “Was even a possibility. But it makes sense, I think, that you were the one to give it to me.”

It doesn’t make sense to Coulson that Daisy of all people is the one to give this back to him, but he is not going to protest. He is going to be selfish and love this extraordinary woman horribly and forever.

“In any case, this is… a bit strange for me,” he confesses, hoping he sounds as excited as he feels. “I had given all this up.”

Daisy turns in his embrace, and Coulson suddenly becomes very aware of her leg slipping between his thighs.

“Then aren’t you grateful I got off my ass and kissed you that night in that tiny motel room?”

Coulson narrows his eyes at her.

“Didn’t _I_ kiss you first?”

Daisy groans.

“Details…” She presses herself against him, their faces close. Even warmer. The familiar vibration of Daisy’s body against his, beginning to stir. “Mere… details.”

She brushes her lips against Coulson’s mouth, but she doesn’t kiss him (yet, the promise implicit, it excites him, as if they hadn’t kissed hundreds of times before).

"I'm glad we did this," Daisy says. "Go get your things from storage."

"Yeah, me too."

He knows Daisy doesn't have that. She doesn't have a past full of things or family memories. Ever since he's known her Daisy's life could fit in a couple of bags. This is important for her, that Coulson can have something she could never.

"And now you have a photograph of your hero," she adds.

At that Coulson has to protest.

"I said he _was_ my hero," he tells her. "That was then. I have a new hero now."

He raises his eyebrow and Daisy, impress, lets out a noise of delight at his corny line.

"Well played, Phillip," she says.

She closes her eyes as his hands skim her back, upwards, grabbing her shoulders.

They kiss, familiar and heated and it goes on for a long time, but when they stop it's like the conversation was never interrupted.

" _Phillip_?” Daisy repeats, frowning, like she has suddenly realized, after all this time, the name is not right. "Your father didn't pick the name, did he?"

Coulson chuckles.

"No, that was my mom."

Daisy looks around.

"Well, that flaw aside, I'd really want to see a picture of your mother now. Do you think there's one around here?"

"I think it's probable."

"Let's finish unpacking then."

Coulson nods. And then he hesitates.

"What?"

"Would you wear my old sweater?" he asks.

Daisy lets out a comically long breath. "Thank God," she says. "I thought that comment had no effect on you whatsoever."

He drops his hands to her hips once more.

"You always have an effect on me," he admits.

Daisy looks on, impressed, and she smiles like she’s about to throw another flirting joke, but she doesn’t, looking like something _far more important_ has come up, and she kisses him again. Coulson maneuvers them both towards the couch, in a hurry to show her exactly the kind of effect she has. They have the whole day to unpack, after all.


End file.
